Apple Picking

Winslow Homer’s Apple Picking presents two girls, their faces shaded by large-brimmed sunbonnets, standing companionably together in full sunlight in the midst of an apple orchard on a gently sloping hillside. One girl holds a basket, but both are idle, apparently gazing into the distance. Their features are largely obscured by the shadows cast by their bonnets, and any direct sense of their personalities, moods, or intentions is secondary to the play of intense light and shadow on their clothing and their surroundings, which glow with the beneficent warmth of a late summer day.

Apple Picking is one of a group of watercolors that Homer painted in the summer of 1878 showing children, singly or in pairs, posed outdoors in rustic dress. These works were painted at Houghton Farm, the estate owned by the artist’s friend and devoted patron, Lawson Valentine, at Mountainville, in the Hudson River Valley of New York State. When Homer exhibited the group in the American Water Color Society’s annual exhibition in New York City the following winter, critics admired the paintings’ fluid naturalism and freshness. While these works demonstrated the free brushwork and rapid execution associated with watercolor painting, they were technically conservative in their dense pigments, the result of mixing the transparent watercolor with gouache, an opaque paint, to give the medium “body.” Nonetheless, as contemporary critics recognized, they marked a turning point not only for Homer but for American watercolor painting in their evocation of natural color, light, and atmosphere.

In his Houghton Farm watercolors, Homer continued the theme of children outdoors that had preoccupied him since the beginning of the decade. Drawing on memories of his own boyhood ramblings in the countryside, Homer capitalized on contemporary fascination with childhood manifested in literary and artistic imagery. In the wake of the Civil War and with the advent of industrialization and urbanization, rustic children embodied hopes for national regeneration as well as nostalgia for lost innocence. Homer, however, treated his youthful subjects without sentimentality or adult condescension. The girls in Apple Picking, like the solitary shepherdess in the Terra Foundation’s Weary (TF 1999.41), another watercolor from his Houghton Farm group, are static and contemplative: lacking the carefree exuberance or coy charm of children portrayed by Homer’s contemporaries, they seem watchful and observant, as if prematurely aware and wise. These figures also echo the commanding solitary and paired women that Homer painted in a variety of settings, from rural Virginia to the English fishing village of Cullercoats.

[possibly exhibited] American Art in Water-Colors. The Twelfth Annual Exhibition of the Water-Color Society, National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1879, no. 234 (as In the Orchard).

Winslow Homer Watercolors, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (organizer). Venues: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 2–May 11, 1986; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, June 6–July 27, 1986; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. [exh. cat.]

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, July 1993.

Regard sur Winslow Homer (Winslow Homer at a Glance), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–September 24, 1995.

Winslow Homer Retrospective, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (organizer). Venues: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 15, 1995–January 28, 1996; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, February 11–May 26, 1996; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, June 17–September 22, 1996. [exh. cat.]

Ville et campagne: les artistes américains, 1870–1920 (The City and the Country: American Perspectives, 1870–1920), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venues: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–July 15, 1999; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, December 10, 1999–May 7, 2000 (in modified form). [exh. cat.]

Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (organizer). Venue: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, February 18–May 6, 2001. [exh. cat.]

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, July 15–October 31, 2007.

Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 16–May 11, 2008. [exh. cat.]

American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent , Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (organizer). Venue: Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 1–May 14, 2017 [exh. cat.]

“The Water Color Society.” The New York Times (February 1st, 1879). Text p. 5 (as In the Orchard).

“American Art in Water-Colors.” New York Evening Post (February 11, 1879). Text front page.

Cooper, Helen A. Winslow Homer Watercolors. (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art). Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986. Text pp. 60, 246 (checklist); ill. p. 53, fig. 38 (color).

Cikovsky, Jr., Nicolai. Winslow Homer: Watercolors. Southport, Connecticut: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1991. Ill. p. 36, pl. 23 (color).

The Magazine Antiques 141, no. 5 (May 1992): 699 (as In the Orchard).

Apple Picking (Two Girls in Sunbonnets), Winslow Homer. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, July 1993. Ill. (black & white).

Brock, Charles. "Winslow Homer." American Art Review 7, no. 1 (February–March 1995): 98–101. Ill. p. 99 (color).

Cikovsky, Jr., Nicolai and Franklin Kelly. Winslow Homer. (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art). Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Text pp. 164, 166; ill. p. 165, cat. 95 (color).

Art and Antiques 19 (1996). Text p. 100.

Regard sur cinq années d'expositions (Five Years of Exhibitions at a Glance). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1997. Text p. 97; ill. p. 90 (color, as Apple Picking (Two Girls in Sunbonnets)).

Cartwright, Derrick R. The City and the Country: American Perspectives, 1870–1920. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1999. Text p. 24 (checklist); ill. frontispiece (color).

Cartwright, Derrick R. Ville et campagne: les artistes américains, 1870–1920. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1999. Text p. 24 (checklist); ill. frontispiece (color).

Conrads, Margaret C. Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s. (exh. cat., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press in association with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2001. Text pp. 153–54; ill. p. 144 (color detail), ill. p. 150, fig. 108 (color).

Unger, Miles and Arnold Skolnick. The Watercolors of Winslow Homer. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Text p. 61; ill. p. 56 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. An American Point of View: The Daniel J. Terra Collection. Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2002. Text pp. 90, 198; ill. p. 91 (color), p. 198 (black & white).

Bourguignon, Katherine M. and Elizabeth Kennedy. Un regard transatlantique. La collection d'art américain de Daniel J. Terra. Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2002. Text pp. 90, 198; ill. p. 91 (color), p. 198 (black & white).

Weinberg Helene Barbara, Barker Elizabeth E. Childe Hassam, American Impressionist. (exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art). New York, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Text p. 264n7.

Trombetta, Lynn Lyman. Falling World. San Francisco, California: Sixteen River Press, 2004. Ill. cover.

Tedeschi, Martha with Kristi Dahm. Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light. (exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois). Chicago, Illinois: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2008. Text pp. 50, 62, 66, 76, 204, 206, 208; ill. pp. 50 fig. a (color detail), 51 fig. b (color).

Tatham, David. Winslow Homer’s Empire State: Houghton Farm and Beyond. (exh. cat. Syracuse University Art Gallery) Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Art Gallery, 2009. Text pp. 37–38, 78.

American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent. (exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017. Text pp. 201–202, 203, 454, 477 (checklist); ill. p. 202 fig.168 (color).

Athens, Elizabeth, Brandon Ruud with Martha Tedeschi. Coming Away: Winslow Homer & England. (exh. cat. Worcester Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum). Worcester, Massachussetts: Worcester Art Museum; Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Milwaukee Art Museum; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2017. Text, p. 71; ill., p. 72 fig. 1 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text pp. 89-90, 102; fig. 7, p. 89; ill. p. 102 (color).